A Prelude to Scandal: The Setting of 1780s France

The 1780s in France represented a critical juncture in the nation’s history, a period when the foundations of the Ancien Régime began to visibly crack under mounting pressures. King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette presided over a court increasingly detached from the realities of their subjects’ lives, while Enlightenment ideas circulated among educated circles, challenging traditional hierarchies and privileges. The American Revolution had concluded just years earlier, draining French coffers while demonstrating that republican ideals could triumph over monarchy. Against this backdrop of financial strain and intellectual ferment, two seemingly separate scandals would expose the rotting foundations of French institutions and accelerate the coming revolution.

The French monarchy faced an unprecedented fiscal crisis following its expensive support of the American colonists against Britain. By 1783, the national debt had reached staggering proportions, requiring innovative financial solutions that would inevitably challenge the privileged status of the nobility and clergy. Meanwhile, the judicial system operated with medieval brutality, preserving torture and cruel punishments that increasingly offended enlightened sensibilities. It was within this combustible environment that the Diamond Necklace Affair would ignite, followed closely by the judicial scandal of the three wheel-breakings, events that would collectively undermine what remained of royal authority and institutional legitimacy.

The Diamond Necklace Incident Unfolds

On August 15, 1785, as preparations were underway for the Feast of the Assumption mass at the royal chapel, Cardinal de Rohan—Prince-Bishop of Strasbourg and a prominent member of the French clergy—was summoned to appear before King Louis XVI, Queen Marie Antoinette, Keeper of the Seals Armand Thomas Hue de Miromesnil, and Minister of the Royal Household Baron de Breteuil. The cardinal found himself accused of fraudulently obtaining an exorbitantly expensive diamond necklace using the queen’s name without authorization. Without ceremony, he was arrested and confined to the Bastille, marking the beginning of what would become known as the Diamond Necklace Affair.

The scandal centered around a magnificent diamond necklace originally commissioned by Louis XV for his mistress Madame du Barry but never delivered due to the king’s death. The jewelers, Bassenge and Boehmer, had struggled for years to find a buyer for this extravagant piece, valued at approximately 1.6 million livres. The ambitious Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy, self-styled Countess de La Motte, concocted an elaborate scheme to acquire the necklace by exploiting Cardinal de Rohan’s desperate desire to regain royal favor, particularly with the queen who had long disapproved of him.

The Web of Deception and Its Unraveling

The Countess de La Motte orchestrated an elaborate deception, employing lookalikes, forged letters, and secret nighttime meetings in the gardens of Versailles to convince Cardinal de Rohan that Queen Marie Antoinette wished him to procure the necklace on her behalf while maintaining secrecy. The cardinal, eager to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the monarchy, agreed to serve as intermediary and provided guarantees to the jewelers. Once the necklace was obtained, the countess and her accomplices promptly dismantled it and sold the diamonds separately in London and Paris.

The scheme unraveled when the jewelers presented their first payment demand to the queen, who denied any knowledge of the transaction. The subsequent investigation and trial became a public spectacle that captivated French society. The Paris Parlement, France’s highest judicial body, eventually determined that Cardinal de Rohan had been deceived by the Countess de La Motte and her collaborators, who had forged documents and staged elaborate ruses to convince him the queen desired the necklace.

Judicial Proceedings and Public Reaction

The trial proceedings fascinated the French public and became a subject of intense debate throughout the kingdom. Despite his immense wealth—with an estimated annual income of 400,000 livres—and his somewhat casual approach to religious duties, Cardinal de Rohan garnered significant public sympathy. When the Parlement declared him not guilty in March 1786, crowds cheered his release, viewing the verdict as a victory for judicial independence against arbitrary royal power.

The king, furious at this challenge to royal authority, used a lettre de cachet to exile the cardinal from Paris, further highlighting the tension between the monarchy and the judiciary. Meanwhile, the Countess de La Motte suffered brutal punishment: she was publicly whipped, branded with a hot iron as a thief, and imprisoned before eventually escaping to London, where she published memoirs accusing her former lovers of orchestrating the deception.

The affair proved deeply humiliating for Queen Marie Antoinette, whose reputation, already damaged by rumors of extravagance and infidelity, suffered further. Popular culture reflected public sentiment against the monarchy: at the Longchamp races, fashionable colors became “cardinal’s colors”—red and yellow symbolizing the cardinal lying on straw in the Bastille. A popular song mocked the situation: “Heaven gave him red/The King and Queen gave him black/The Parlement gave him white/Praise be to Heaven.”

A Second Scandal: Judicial Brutality Exposed

Simultaneously with the necklace affair, a completely different type of judicial scandal emerged that further eroded public confidence in institutions. In October 1785, the Paris Parlement sentenced a laborer and two cattle merchants to breaking on the wheel—a brutal punishment where the condemned had their limbs broken before being executed—for allegedly violently robbing a farm near Troyes in Champagne in January 1783.

The case attracted the attention of Jean-Baptiste Mercier-Dupaty, president of the Bordeaux Parlement and a longstanding critic of judicial practices and punishments. Outraged by the delayed proceedings, shoddy and possibly fabricated evidence, and the cruel sentence, Mercier-Dupaty composed a lengthy judicial memoir detailing what became known as the “three wheel-breakings” scandal, condemning the judicial system as “barbaric.”

The Paris Parlement responded by demanding that Mercier-Dupaty burn all copies of his memoir, with one senior judge accusing reformers like him of abandoning their country “under the pretext of following natural law to overthrow our laws.” Despite this opposition, Mercier-Dupaty ultimately prevailed, and the three condemned men were exonerated and released in December 1787, two years after their sentencing. His intervention directly contributed to judicial reforms implemented by the new Keeper of the Seals, Chrétien-François de Lamoignon.

The Cultural and Social Impact of the Scandals

These twin scandals resonated deeply throughout French society, reflecting and accelerating broader cultural shifts. The legal profession emerged as a central force in shaping public opinion, with lawyers consciously adopting roles as legal experts and defenders of justice. They published trial briefs of sensational cases that both served their clients’ interests and fed public appetite for scandal. These publications proved enormously popular, with sales increasing from 10,000 copies in the 1770s to 20,000 in the 1780s. Nicolas-Toussaint des Essarts, himself a lawyer, edited a staggering 196 volumes of such cases.

These publications revealed and reinforced a growing cultural divide between traditional aristocratic values—increasingly portrayed as violent, feudal, and immoral—and emerging Enlightenment ideals of citizenship, reason, and utility. The nobility’s legitimacy faced challenges even from within its own ranks, as enlightened aristocrats like the Count of Mirabeau, the Marquis of Saint-Fargeau Le Peletier, and the Count of Montlosier criticized what they viewed as archaic judicial practices and feudal inequalities. Montlosier later recalled that in the 1780s, he shared the popular view that “the feudal system was a barbaric institution, judicial rights were an encroachment on royal authority, and the land tax system violated the rights of the people.”

The Legacy and Modern Relevance

The Diamond Necklace Affair and the judicial scandal of the three wheel-breakings represented more than isolated incidents of corruption and injustice—they became powerful symbols of systemic failure. These events demonstrated a fundamental crisis of authority in which traditional institutions of power—the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the judiciary—increasingly lost legitimacy in the eyes of the public.

The scandals highlighted how public opinion, once a marginal force, had become a powerful factor in political life. The legal profession’s role in mediating between institutions and the public, the circulation of printed materials discussing affairs of state, and the willingness of segments of the elite to criticize their own privilege all pointed toward the emerging public sphere that would characterize modern political life.

These events also demonstrated the potent political function of scandal in transitional periods. By focusing attention on specific cases of injustice or corruption, reformers could leverage public outrage to demand broader systemic changes. This pattern would repeat in subsequent revolutionary moments across different societies, illustrating how particular scandals can crystallize abstract grievances into concrete demands for reform.

Most significantly, these affairs revealed the weakening foundations of the Ancien Régime in its final years. When Louis XVI attempted to reform the tax system to address the financial crisis—seeking to eliminate noble tax exemptions and curb the Parlements’ ability to block royal reforms—he found his authority already too diminished to overcome resistance from privileged groups. The monarchy’s inability to navigate these challenges would ultimately lead to the convening of the Estates-General in 1789 and the beginning of the French Revolution.

The Diamond Necklace Affair thus stands as a pivotal moment in the transition from old regime to modernity, illustrating how scandals can expose systemic flaws, how public opinion can shape political outcomes, and how the failure of institutions to adapt to changing values can have revolutionary consequences. Its legacy endures as a cautionary tale about the vulnerability of seemingly stable institutions when they lose their moral authority and connection to the society they govern.